


(everything’s gonna be) Fine, Fine, Fine

by Byrcca



Series: Equinox [1]
Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Episode: s05e26 Equinox, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-20 05:14:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16549598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Byrcca/pseuds/Byrcca
Summary: Harry hates it when mom and dad fight...





	(everything’s gonna be) Fine, Fine, Fine

**Author's Note:**

> There are references to my stories, Belonging, Internal Validity, and Tom and B’Elanna’s coffee conversation in the How Bad Is It one-shots.

_And what it all comes down to_  
_Is that everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine_  
_'Cause I've got one hand in my pocket_  
_And the other one is giving a high five_

~ Hand In My Pocket, Jagged Little Pill.

 

“Minced beef.”

“What?”

“His initials, Burke. Minced beef.”

“Oh. I thought you were thinking about lunch.” B’Elanna picked her way through the mess that was the bridge of the _Equinox_ , Harry at her heels. She pushed a sagging cable out of her way, and Harry reached above her head and held it up. “Watch your footing,” she said, looking down and taking an exaggerated step forward. It was still dark on the bridge, with the only illumination coming from the emergency lights and the flickering work panels that lined the workstations. The floor was littered with debris, and the scent of scorched plastisteel hung in the air.

“Let’s start with the sensors, we want to know if any more of those fissures start to open.” She crouched under the ops console, and tugged on a panel, grunting with the effort. 

“Sure,” Harry agreed. He attached a magnetic light to the top of the console and dialed it down, so it shone dimly, making the area glow. “So, you and Burke, huh?”

Her head jerked toward him, and she frowned. “What? What did Tom say to you?”

“Nothing. What did you think he’d say?” He crouched beside her and took the panel off her hands, whistled at the mess that used to be the guts of the operations workstation. He reached into a tool kit and handed her a hyperspanner. 

“Well, how did he seem?”

“Seem?”

“Yeah.” 

She slanted a glance at him and Harry scowled in confusion. “He… seemed like Tom.”

“Huh,” she sniffed. “Of course he did.” Her voice had taken on a clipped quality, and her tone was edged with irritation. 

Harry’s eyebrows drew together in confusion. “How should he have seemed?” he asked. He rummaged in the toolkit for a microspanner.

“Oh, I don’t know.” B’Elanna reached into the guts of the console and yanked on a length of tubing and chucked it over her shoulder. Some charred isolinear chips came flying out next. “We’re, and I quote, _in the ass end of the galaxy_ , thirty-five thousand light years from home and, against all logical rules of probability, my ex-boyfriend shows up out of the blue, out of the black, and _Tom’s fine_ with it.” 

Harry had known he was out of his depth before he waded in, but he’d followed her anyway. He’d have to watch out for the undertow. “Well,” he tried, “he is at _yellow alert_.”

She harrumphed. 

“Look,” Harry sighed, “would you rather he be jealous?”

“Maybe. A little.” She pounded on something metallic with the heel of her hand, and Harry appreciated the _pwap pWAP_ sound it made. “Four times,” she muttered, “...almost two years.”

Harry hadn’t quite caught that last bit. She was head and shoulders into the console, venting her frustration on the computer uplink core, which appeared to be fused to its mount. Better it than him. He used the ‘spanner to undo the restraining bolts holding the top panel to the body of the workstation, then lifted the LCARS display panel out of its bed and gently set it on the floor. He stared down at the top of B’Elanna’s head, criss-crossed by EPS conduits and vent tubing. It looked like she had a rack of isolinear chips growing out of her ear. 

“What was that?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

She’d said something about four times in two years. Unlike himself, it couldn’t be how often they’d had sex, if the complaints from her neighbours on deck nine were to be believed. Was that how often Tom had been jealous? But who would he have been jealous of on _Voyager_ , the warp core? It seemed to be the only thing that vied for her time and affections. Most of the time, it seemed like it only behaved when she was around, and as soon as she went off duty, or they had planned a date—to hear Tom say it at least—it would break down in a fit of pique. A sentient warp core harbouring a jealous love for the chief engineer. He wondered, if they studied its clouds of white and blue, if they’d be able to read an _I love you_ in its swirling depths of antimatter. Talk about an explosive relationshi—

Oh. Oohhhhh…. Harry had a sudden flash on a conversation he’d had with Tom almost two years ago, right after he and B’Elanna had started dating. The one about the L-word. The Big L. And Tom’s inability to say it. He peered at B’Elanna as she concentrated on the innards of the ops console. Was Tom really that much of an idiot that he still hadn’t told B’Elanna he loved her? Or, rather, had he really only said it four times in almost two years? Love wasn’t pizza! It’s not like he would run out of slices if he shared.

Harry shook his head. “You know how Tom feels about you, right?”

She grunted in response.

“I mean, you do _know_ , right? He’s told you.” The ass.

“Of course.”

“Recently?” When he was still home, he’d told Libby daily. 

Another grunt. Ahhhh… So he hadn’t told her recently. And suddenly an uneasy feeling stole over him: what if he wasn’t actually in love with her? What if, like with other interests or hobbies or holodeck programmes, Tom’s affection for her had waned, but he was still around out of habit. Geography. Harry felt an unreasonable apprehension steal over him. Some things just _were_ : Neelix liked everyone, Tuvok put up with being Tom’s straight man, Chakotay pined for the Captain, and Tom and B’Elanna were in love with each other and would be forever. Put a period after it. Or, according their neighbours, a row of exclamation marks. 

But what if Tom wasn’t anymore? Like his crush on Kes so many years ago, what if he’d gotten over it? Like his own infatuation, his own love for Derran Tal that he had had to crush when he’d chosen his life on _Voyager_ over a life wandering the quadrant with her and her break-away band of Verro rebels. 

No. Tom loved B’Elanna. 

Harry realized he was staring at the back of B’Elanna’s head, and his mouth had dropped open. His pulse had jumped; he could hear it pounding in his ears on the eerily quiet bridge. 

“He could be a little jealous, that’s all I’m saying,” B’Elanna admitted. “I mean, how does he know I didn’t regret leaving him ten years ago?”

“Burke?” Harry tried.

“Tom!”

Maybe she did regret it. Maybe seeing Burke again had brought back all those feelings of first love, that flush. But for Harry, it had come with a giddy awkwardness, a self-doubting anxiety that had only served to kill it instead of nurture what might-have-been. But what if Burke and B’Elanna, B&B (bread and butter), had been deliriously happy. What if some misunderstanding, or distance, had separated them? What if, now that they were together again, stuck together again because the _Equinox_ was going exactly nowhere under her own power, they had the opportunity to sort out any misunderstandings they’d had when they’d been dating? It was a sobering thought. And if she thought Tom didn’t love her anymore… He needed to warn him!

But first, a little recon was required. “Do you?” he asked, “Regret it?” What if she saw this as an opportunity to make up for what she thought she’d lost forever? 

“Of course not! I had good reasons for… I mean, Max is a great guy, but… But _he_ doesn’t know that!”

“Burke?” From the few minutes he’d spent in his company, he had the feeling that Maxwell Burke had a pretty good idea of his own self worth. B’Elanna shot him a withering look.

“Tom. He doesn’t know that I had a good reason to break up with Max.” 

Right. Of course. Harry nodded. “So, you want him to be jealous? Tom.”

She made that sound that only fed up female partners can master, a vocal disgusted, disappointed puff of air. The one that said, without actually saying anything, _Oh my (Insert Deity Here) HOW can you not get this?!?_. 

Harry tried again. “So, you want them both to be jealous. Phasers at dawn?” Bat’leths? He had the sneaking suspicion that she could mop the floor with both of them.

“Yes. No. Of course not.” Her mouth twisted into a pout. “Maybe a little,” she admitted. 

“B’Elanna.” In for a penny… “Do you want me to talk to Tom?”

She looked horrified. “No!”

“You guys aren’t having problems, are you?”

“It’s fine, Harry.”

“I mean, you’re happy, right?”

“It’s fine!”

Harry may not have a lot of experience with relationships, he hadn’t dated as many women as Tom had, certainly, and despite the fact that he and Libby had never had a real fight, even he knew that _fine_ did not equate to great. It didn’t even equate to _good_. Tom was in trouble and didn’t even know it. Maybe he was so comfortable in his relationship with B’Elanna, so used to there being no one to threaten it, that he didn’t recognize a rival when he was standing right in front of him. 

Or maybe he did. That smile he’d sent Burke hadn’t exactly been dazzling. He hadn’t really exuded that _any friend of my girlfriend is a friend of mine_ air of joviality. Of course, it was a memorial service… 

He would have to talk to Tom later, Harry decided. Before dinner with Burke. Maybe Tom knew full well that there was some danger here, despite what B’Elanna had said about that decade-old breakup. Maybe he should act a little jealous even if he weren’t. Did Klingons even get jealous, or were their relationships too forthright for misunderstanding? If they did get jealous, was it _de rigueur_ to simply kill your rival? 

And he was back to bat’leths at dawn. 

“Torres to Kim, hello?” 

She was staring at him, hunched on her haunches, and she bumped his leg with her shoulder. He backed up, kicking a lump of twisted casing out of the way, and she shimmied out of the console. She stood and reached into the gap left by the removal of the touchpad display and pulled some wires, and began to attach them to the auxiliary EPS burner. “Did you get the chips changed?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good. Let’s put it back together and try it again.”

She meant the console, right? Just the console. 

********

**Author's Note:**

> Songwriters: Alanis Morissette / Glen Ballard  
> Hand in My Pocket lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, The Bicycle Music Company


End file.
